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Featured Books

"The Blackwell Guide to Aesthetics is the most authoritative survey of the central issues in contemporary aesthetics available. The volume features eighteen newly commissioned papers on the evaluation of art, the interpretation of art, and many other forms of art such as literature, movies, and music...Functions as the ideal text for undergraduate and graduate courses in aesthetics, art theory, and philosophy of art."

"Covers the key concepts, arguments, problems and figures in aesthetics and the philosophy of art. This introduction to aesthetics provides a layered treatment of both the historical background and contemporary debates in aesthetics."

Whether it's cartoons, quotations, or interesting anecdotes from related fields, you've never seen a more interesting philosophy textbook than this one. Philosophy, an Introduction to Wondering explains the central concepts of philosophy in ways you can understand by showing how it's all connected. And best of all, this philosophy textbook helps you develop the analytical skills you need to critically engage the "big picture" of Western philosophy for yourself.

Philosophy is a dangerous profession, risking censorship, prison, even death. And no wonder: philosophers have questioned traditional pieties and threatened the established political order. Some claimed to know what was thought unknowable; others doubted what was believed to be certain. Some attacked religion in the name of science; others attacked science in the name of mystical poetry; some served tyrants; others were radical revolutionaries. This historically based collection of philosophers' reflections--the letters, journals, prefaces that reveal their hopes and hesitations, their triumphs and struggles, their deepest doubts and convictions--allow us to witness philosophical thought-in-process. It sheds light on the many--and conflicting--aims of philosophy: to express skepticism or overcome it, to support theology or attack it, to develop an ethical system or reduce it to practical politics. As their audiences differed, philosophers experimented with distinctive rhetorical strategies, writing dialogues, meditations, treatises, aphorisms. Ranging from Plato to Hannah Arendt, with contributions from 44 philosophers (Augustine, Maimonides, AlGhazali, Descartes, Pascal, Leibniz, Voltaire, Rousseau, Hobbes, Hume, Kant, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Wittgenstein, among others) this remarkable collection documents philosophers' claim that they change as well as understand the world. In her introductory essay, "Witnessing Philosophers," Amelie Rorty locates philosophers' reflections in the larger context of the many facets of their other activities and commitments.

Philosophy: An Innovative Introduction features a unique, engaging approach to introduce students to philosophy. It combines traditional readings and exercises with fictive narratives starring central figures in the history of the field from Plato to Martin Luther King, Jr. The book makes innovative use of compelling short stories from two writers who have prominently combined philosophy and fiction in their work. These narratives illuminate pivotal aspects of the carefully selected classic readings that follow. This gives students two ways to understand the philosophical positions: through indirect argument in fiction and through direct, deductive presentations. Study questions and writing exercises accompany each set of readings and help students grasp the material and create their own arguments.

"In The Deepest Human Life [Scott Samuelson] takes philosophy back from the specialists and restores it to its proper place at the center of our humanity, rediscovering it as our most profound effort toward understanding, as a way of life that anyone can live."

Dr. Pressler's Suggested Materials

"This program presents the ideas of key figures in the shaping and understanding of aesthetics—from Plato, Francis Hutcheson, and Kant to Leon Battista Alberti, Stendhal, and Tolstoy—and addresses pivotal writings, including Aristotle’s Poetics and Morris Weitz’s “The Role of Theory in Aesthetics.”"